Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Meanwhile, basic financial services came to be offered in the growing towns and cities across the west, especially through Jewish commercial networks. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries Jewish people all over the west became prominent in moneylending, as well as long-distance trade, carrying commodities like salt, cloth, wine, and enslaved people throughout the old Roman world.26 Of course, Europe’s Jews were not thanked for this pioneering contribution to the macroeconomic fabric of their world: rather, they were the object of suspicion, derision, and bursts of violent persecution, which accelerated during the Crusades and crescendoed in the late thirteenth century with waves of pogroms and expulsions throughout western Europe.* Nevertheless, the Jewish contribution to the great medieval economic revival was significant. • • •